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I noticed an IP conflict today on a windows box hosted on the ESXi. In the events viewer under system I checked the MAC address of the system trying to hijack my IP address. I wanted to find a quick way and check if this mac address is in my existing ESXi Virtual Machines or it’s outside somewhere..
I wanted to find a quick and dirty way to check this since there is number of machines on the ESXi host.
Here is what I did…

I opened VMWare VI-TOOLKIT. After I connected I decided to try some commands that I regularly use such as get-vm and get-vmguest. After I found nothing interesting I checked out the CI Toolkit Cmdlets Reference Document.

How to extract the IP addresses in use by the Guests in our VMware ESX host?
This was the question that I asked myself yesterday, when I had to go over a long list of IPs and check if any of the listed IPs was in use by any Guest Operating system on our ESX server. I immediately thought of the VMware VI Toolkit and all the nice commands that I have seen there, but none of those came to me immediately. A colleague was swifter and used python to get any matches after he copied all IPs manually using the Infrastructure Client, but since I had few spare minutes today, I decided to solve this one and post the answer. Here it is:

The main reason behind this is the fact that I needed more space for 2 more Oracle databases on a SLES10 Linux system. The partition mounted on /u01 was initially created as 21GB but I quickly depleted the space with 3 oracle 10g databases that took more than 17GB and the space left was not sufficient for the 2 new databases that I had to create.

Before I advanced with the extension of the VMDK file I connected to each separate instance and performed “shutdown immediate” command as sysdba.
Then I stopped the listener, dbconsole, isqlplus and once I confirmed that no oracle related processes were present on the system I performed a shutdown “shutdown -h now”.

In order to extend an existing hard drive attached to a virtual machine you have to make sure no snapshots of the virtual machine are present. I know that this is quite uncomfortable considering the risky operation that you are about to perform but there is a work around. (The work around is not in this post, so please let me know if you are interested or simply search for it. There is a good chance that I will have an article concerning that topic)

When I finished the clusterware install in the lab environment I have continued with the database software itself but it appears that I needed a VMware ESXi Update 3 required! The kernel version of SLES failed verification and upon an upgrade of the kernel through YAST both machines were unusable since they would not boot.

This is an obstacle until completed since I can’t continue with the How-to until this is done.

In Part 9 of the Oracle RAC How-to we have completed successfully the installation of the Oracle Clusterware services on the shared storage for the two Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP5 nodes.